Bill Batsford - Special to the Register
Snowy Owl at Hammonasset on 12/2/2013.

In a bad year, you might have to go clear above the Arctic Circle to scope out a snowy owl, one of the most beautiful, powerful and impressive birds on Earth.

Or maybe you’d spend decades of your life just hoping to see one.

But if you’re a bird watcher or someone who’s always wanted to see a snowy owl, clearly this is a good year. It’s even a good year if you never knew you wanted to see one — with owl sightings popping almost everywhere along the Connecticut coast over the past couple of months.

In bird circles, they call this an “irruption” — and snowy owls, the heaviest owls in North America at between 3½ and 6½ pounds, with a wingspan of up to 6 feet — are irrupting all over the place this year.

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Bird experts say the rare spectacle is the most significant snowy owl irruption in the past 40 or 50 years — made even more accessible to average folks because of the rise of online bird lists that email you and tell you when a bird is spotted.

Just how plentiful are they? Let’s take a look around ...

There’s a big white owl with “a dodgy eye” whooooo’s been hanging out at Long Wharf in New Haven on a regular basis, bird experts say.

Let’s just call him “Long Wharf Louie.”

Another owl was spotted at Sandy Point in West Haven.

Just a few days ago, a snowy owl was perched atop the federal court building in Hartford — and over last weekend, one was spotted at the end of Brazos Road on the East Haven shore, said Patrick Comins, director of Bird Conservation for Audubon Connecticut, the state chapter of the National Audubon Society.

Meanwhile, there have been multiple recent sightings at other local “hot spots,” such as Long Beach and the Great Meadows Marsh near Sikorsky Memorial Airport in Stratford, Short Beach and Stratford Point in Stratford, Milford Point and Hammonasset Beach State Park in Madison, said Comins and Frank Gallo, director of the Connecticut Audubon Society’sCoastal Center at Milford Point.

Where in a normal year you might see two or three reports of snowy owls in a season in Connecticut, this year people are seeing them practically every day — sometimes two or three at a time, Gallo and Comins said.

And lest you think Connecticut is alone in this abundance, the beautiful birds — white with brown scallops or speckles and big, piercing yellow eyes — are turning up all over Pennsylvania and upstate New York, throughout the Great Lakes region and down the East Coast as far south as the Carolinas and Florida — yes, Arctic birds in Florida — and even way out east in Bermuda.

“This is thoroughly unprecedented as far as the number of birds that are around,” said Gallo.

“A person could argue that it’s the biggest wildlife-watching event in North America,” said Denver Holt, an owl researcher with the Owl Research Institute in Charlo, Mont., which has run a breeding season study in Barrow, Alaska, for the past 22 years.

It’s the second-longest-running study of its kind in the world, after one in Russia that has been going on for 27 years, he said.

“People admire something like the snowy owl,” Holt said, offering one reason for the excitement the irruption has stimulated. “Snowy owls and polar bears are really the icons of the Arctic.”

While it’s often “the luck of the draw” whether you can see a bird, even if you go to someplace where one has been reported, “folks should be thrilled if they get to see one” and “they should keep their eyes open,” said Comins.

Snowy owls generally like big open areas, so people looking for them should keep their eyes open along marshes near the shore, cornfields, landfills and, yes, airports, he said.

“I’ve seen three” so far this year, said Comins. “I saw two in Hartford at the old Hartford landfill and I saw one at Milford Point,” beginning just before Thanksgiving.

For birdwatchers, “They’re tough to beat,” Comins said. “I think they’re more impressive than an eagle. ... There are a lot of spectacular birds, but the snowy owls, I think, are on just about everybody’s lists.”

This year, the number of sightings on those lists are way up in a lot of places.

At the Christmas bird count out at Nantucket Island off Massachusetts, “there were 33” snowy owls counted — the highest count ever in New England, said Gallo.

“Usually there are two or three,” he said.

Last month, snowy owls that showed up at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports in New York and New Jersey collided with five airplanes, prompting the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — facing outrage over initial efforts to kill the birds at JFK — to switch to a program to trap and relocate the birds, according to The New York Times.

Even longtime researchers like Holt can’t say for sure why the birds came down so far south this year.

“Why go to Bermuda or Florida or Dallas?” he asked. “The only thing we know for sure is that they had a good breeding year.”

Looking at the birds arriving here in the U.S., “90 percent of the birds are young birds,” he said. “That just tells us that somewhere up in the Arctic ... the lemming populations were abundant and the owls had a good reproductive year.”

As for the assumption many experts have that the lemming population has since “crashed, no one knows that,” Holt said. “That’s just guessing.”

Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, N.Y., said the first two owls he saw this year both were adults.

He also says he’s not sure that a lack of food is the reason for the migration.

“The basic bottom line is, we don’t know for sure. But there are several possibilities,” McGowan said.

The thing many people may have heard or read, that this year’s huge irruption resulted from a previous population explosion of the lemmings, a rodent the owls love to eat up in the Arctic, and a subsequent drying-up or collapse of the food supply, may well be true.

But it hasn’t been proven, McGowan said.

“A lot of things follow a boom and bust cycles” and “one of these is the lemmings...” he said. “So a snowy owl in a moderate lemming year might lay three or four eggs, while a snowy owl in a high lemming year might lay six or seven eggs.”

Then when the lemmings crash, it’s possible that “there just isn’t enough food up there and the owls are coming down this way because they are so desperate for food.”

Last year, there also was a big influx of snowy owls, “but in the middle of the continent” in places like Kansas and Texas, he said.

One thing that clearly is changing is that improved technology is making it easier to keep track of the birds, he said. A multi-state research group known as Project SNOWstorm put transmitters on two snowy owls and “get these incredibly detailed reports,” he said.

Among other things, they learned that one owl on Assateague Island off Maryland exhibits behavior “that includes flying out to sea at night, apparently to hunt sleeping ducks,” McGowan said. “We didn’t know they did that.”

The excitement of this year’s irruption also has been fed by the continued growth of online birding email lists that notify subscribers when there are sightings.

Roy Harvey of Beacon Falls, the CT Birds listmaster and a birder for 15 years, said he has seen owls twice this season in Stratford “and each time I saw a white spot out in the marsh ... which when I put the scope on, I could tell it was a snowy owl.”

But other people he knows have seen them much closer.

“I think it’s wonderful for the exposure it’s getting birding and for the people who are going out beyond their backyards,” he said of the snowy owl irruption.

Jerry Connolly, owner of The Audubon Shop in Madison, said there are “at least four or five individuals at Hammonasset, but they’ve been in and out.”

Earlier this week, Hammonnaset “had one right on the West Beach pavilion.”

For Connolly and his customers, that’s exciting.

“People are blown away. We’ve been doing this 28 years now. This is the largest irruption that I’ve ever seen...” he said. “People are thrilled — even the very hard-core birders and then the backyard people ... So it’s really been the easiest year that I can remember.”

As far as excitement in the birding community goes, “it’s right up there because it doesn’t happen every other year...” Connolly said. Snowy owls are “one of those glamour birds ... You’re going to get a lot more excited about that than a clay-colored sparrow, for instance. It’s a lot sexier.”

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